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00:00One man's name has become synonymous with crime in the 1930s.
00:10Feared and respected.
00:13Idolized and immortalized on screen countless times.
00:19Regarded by some...
00:23...as the ultimate gangster.
00:30He's here, gentlemen.
00:33But who was he, really?
00:37What do we actually know about him?
00:41It's all yours, Al.
00:45Me. I'm quitting.
00:51At only 26 years old, Alphonse Gabriel Capone...
00:55...will become the boss of one of the biggest crime syndicates America has ever known.
01:04But this was just the beginning of the Al Capone story.
01:25We all know the name.
01:51We all know the name.
01:56But what do we really know about the man?
02:05Why is it that his name sits above so many others?
02:12The day that I learned about Al Capone in school...
02:15...I went back to my grandfather and I told him that I had learned about this guy, Al Capone.
02:19He said, oh yeah, what did they teach you?
02:22Well, they taught me that he was a thief and a robber and he killed people.
02:28He said, oh yeah, is that all they taught you?
02:31Did he tell you that he gave people jobs?
02:34No.
02:36Did they tell you that he gave people soup in the time when they couldn't get soup at the other kitchens?
02:41No.
02:42Did they tell you that he had given money to build an orphanage?
02:46I said no.
02:47He goes, what kind of school you go to, they teach you this.
02:50Next time you go to school, don't pay attention to everything they say.
02:53Come and ask me next.
02:54What I learned was that Al Capone was many things.
02:58He was almost anything to anybody, which is what makes him such a good mythological figure.
03:03My name is Deirdre Marie Capone.
03:07I am Al Capone's grand-niece.
03:11Was Al Capone a mobster?
03:13Yes, he was.
03:15Was Al Capone a monster?
03:17No, he was not.
03:19The myth has become the reality.
03:20And that's the difficult part of it.
03:22Once something has been said so many times, it becomes the norm.
03:27The myth is so enormous that we have to go back to the sources.
03:31I keep wondering if there were signs early on of what Al Capone would become.
03:37By all accounts, he came from a stable, caring family.
03:42No evidence of cruelty or violence or abuse.
03:47So what led him down that path?
03:50We know that his father, Gabriel Capone, was 29 years old when he boarded the ship, the Werra, bound for America.
04:04Alongside his pregnant wife, Teresa, 27, and their two children.
04:08It was a time of mass immigration to America.
04:14In the 1890s, over 600,000 Italians would make the crossing.
04:19The prejudice against Italians was tremendous.
04:23The Italians were the largest immigrant group to come during that period.
04:28And people didn't know when these numbers were going to stop.
04:32You can go back and look at political cartoons of the time.
04:35And they show Italians swarming onto the shores like little rats with knives in their teeth.
04:45They were the last to be hired and the first to be fired.
04:49The signs that were out in the window.
04:52If you're Italian, don't apply for a job here.
04:54They had to learn not only to navigate the world in a foreign language, but they had to do it without skills that would have gotten them jobs.
05:06The system fails the immigrant.
05:10And so the immigrant must resort to other ways of doing things.
05:13The family moved to a small apartment at 95 Navy Street in Brooklyn.
05:21And it's here, five years after their arrival, that Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born.
05:30On the 17th of January, 1899.
05:34The first child conceived and born in their adopted America.
05:43Capone grew up very poor.
05:45He was one of nine kids and really had to start working pretty young to try to help his family out.
05:50His parents were law-abiding citizens.
05:53His father was a barber in Brooklyn.
05:56You know, a barber's salary wasn't going to feed nine kids.
05:59So he and his brothers all went to work at a pretty young age.
06:03He eventually leaves school at 14, having apparently beaten up one of the teachers.
06:08And for me, psychologically, that tells us a couple of things.
06:12One, he had no respect for authority.
06:16Or is it that he felt anger and rage?
06:21He pretty much grew up on the streets.
06:27Street gangs were prevalent at the time.
06:30And Al's early involvement with Brooklyn gangs exposed him to people who would go on to lead him down a far darker path.
06:38He was a bruiser. He grew to about five foot eleven. And he's hefty.
06:51What happens when you see a tough guy on the street, the gangsters begin to put them to work.
06:57One time I did something I regretted.
07:00I held this guy who somebody else beat up.
07:06When it was all over, I had blood on my shirt.
07:10The guy peeled off a $50 bill and threw it to me.
07:14You know, so when you see that kind of money come out, it's like, whoa.
07:18When you are around that violence, you begin to take it for granted and you begin to think of it as an option.
07:25Wow, this, you know, this is pretty profitable.
07:29I think as the son of an immigrant, it would have taken him a long time to find his sense of self.
07:35To figure out who he wanted to relate to and why.
07:39But in finding that he was good at something, finding a foothold in this criminal career, gave him a very, very strong sense of identity.
07:48He's connected with the Five Points Gang, which is one of the leading gangs at the time.
07:57His opportunities are pretty limited as an uneducated, first-generation immigrant.
08:03And suddenly, he sees a way that if he's willing to take some risks, he can make some good money.
08:09He found himself working at a place called the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, which was definitely not an Ivy League establishment.
08:22This was a really rough bar owned by a guy named Frankie Yale.
08:28Frankie Yale was a really tough guy.
08:30He ran the ice rackets in Brooklyn.
08:33If you tried to sell ice without Frankie's approval, you were going to end up with an ice pick in your knee.
08:38That's the kind of guy Frankie was, and that's the guy Capone went to work for as a teenager.
08:44So, he's hanging around the Harvard Inn, and he's meeting some of the toughest, most dangerous guys in New York.
08:51And he's getting ideas. This is what it takes to be successful.
08:56So, Capone's working at Frankie Yale's Harvard Inn in 1917, and a fight breaks out.
09:03A fight that Capone's responsible for starting.
09:08And one, in a way, that he'd never recover from.
09:16When we think of gangsters, what's the name we think of first?
09:23Al Capone.
09:24Capone.
09:26But who was he really?
09:30How did he get those infamous scars?
09:34When he was just a teenager working at the Harvard Inn, he saw a girl that he liked.
09:41And he started talking to her, and she told him to get lost.
09:45Capone didn't give up quite so easily.
09:46He approached her again, maybe two or three times, and finally, this girl's brother stepped in.
09:55We're not sure whether it was using a knife or whether it was actually using a bottle.
10:00Whatever it was, it left Capone with three deep scars down his cheek.
10:04Al Capone is 17 years old, and he's just been marked for life.
10:20He's been made to look like a criminal, scarred by violence.
10:24Did this turn him away from leading a normal life? Did it change him?
10:31He's a young man. He's a teenager.
10:34He hasn't found a wife yet.
10:37Suddenly, he's got these three brutal, really bright scars across his face and neck.
10:43You can't avoid seeing it.
10:45It's probably the first thing you notice when you look at him.
10:48So this must have been, you know, really traumatic.
10:50When you're looking at a young person who's been scarred, they can go one of two ways.
10:54Either they're gonna take it inward and be very insular about what's happened,
10:59try and hide it, try and disguise it.
11:02Or you might have someone who eventually turns that into something else
11:05where they feel the rage from what's happened to them.
11:10At this stage in his life, Capone's still just tired muscle.
11:15He's not a gangster. Not yet.
11:18Not yet.
11:20In 1918, Al would meet the woman he'd spend the rest of his life with, May.
11:26A devout Irish Catholic from a respectable family.
11:30They would get married three weeks after the birth of their only child, Albert Francis Sonny Capone.
11:36Capone was a very good husband and father in a peculiar way.
11:41He loved his only child, Sonny. He absolutely adored him.
11:46He rang his mother and his wife every single night. He would phone them.
11:51He was, and he wanted to be, a family man.
11:57But he played around.
11:58And in those days, playing around had serious consequences.
12:06During Al's youth, syphilis was very, very common.
12:11He probably contracted syphilis as a young man in his early 20s and didn't seek the treatment that could have nipped it in the bud.
12:21Alcohol was seen to be one of the big contributing factors to the spread of venereal disease.
12:26Perception was that people were more likely to engage in extramarital sexual encounters if they had been drinking.
12:36Around the turn of the century, there was a movement to see about maybe banning alcohol.
12:44And liquor has no more business in the constitution of my country than a rattlesnake has in your baby's cradle.
12:52The National Women's Christian Temperance Union announces a campaign for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
13:05It seems so bizarre looking at it now that an entire country would ban the sale and production of alcohol to try and curb his social ills.
13:17Al Capone turned 21 just as prohibition was becoming the law.
13:23It passes at a time when the nation was really more conservative.
13:28And unfortunately, by the time it becomes the law in the early 1920s, those attitudes have changed.
13:34People no longer want to sacrifice. They want to have a good time.
13:38But now we've got this law that we passed a while ago.
13:40So what happens when you take away one of the biggest industries in America, a business that brings pleasure to people, and you say it's over?
13:50You can't go to your local liquor store. You can't go to your local bar.
13:54Some people might decide that they're going to take that into their own hands.
13:56There was one criminal that would alter the course of Al's life like no other.
14:04When Capone was working at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, he met a lot of powerful people, and one of them was Johnny Torrio.
14:11Johnny Torrio was one of the brightest people in that business. If it wasn't for Johnny Torrio, Al Capone would have never been able to be what he was.
14:26Torrio was much older and a very careful, dignified guy who treated the crime work that he did as a serious undertaking, something not to be handled capriciously.
14:37He goes home every night to his wife. He treats it as a nine-to-five job, even though that nine-to-five job is extraordinarily violent.
14:47He really takes to Capone, and he takes him under his wing.
14:52I think he sees Capone as brighter than the average thug, and he trains him up.
14:59He realized that he was an intelligent man who could actually do the job well.
15:07Torrio eventually left New York and moved to Chicago, where he became one of the biggest of all operators in the underworld.
15:17Torrio recruited Capone to come to Chicago.
15:23So it's 1920. Al's now living in Chicago.
15:26In the early 20th century, it's very much a working-class city.
15:36It has a population of about 2.8 million, which has doubled almost every decade since the mid-19th century.
15:44It's a crazy town then, because it was growing so fast.
15:49It seemed out of control at times, and that led to a kind of wildness, a kind of lawlessness.
15:54The great thing about prohibition for gangsters is that it provides all sorts of different options.
15:58You can distill, you can brew, you can ship, and of course, because it's illegal, you can hijack other peoples.
16:06He's working for Johnny Torrio, but at this point, he isn't the man at the top in Chicago.
16:13So who is?
16:14Johnny Torrio goes over to Chicago to work for his uncle, Jim Colosimo.
16:25Who is the man in town.
16:29He's a ruthless businessman.
16:32He's built up an empire of a hundred brothels.
16:35He not only runs brothels and gambling operations, he runs one of the most popular restaurants.
16:40Jim will become the catalyst for Capone's success.
16:47Colosimo didn't really want to change things.
16:51He knew his business.
16:53He was very good at the brothel business.
16:55He felt he had a formula that worked.
16:58He could see that other groups had managed to buy up most of the breweries and the distilleries in the area.
17:05So he thought they'd be starting from scratch.
17:07He's dragging his heels, whereas Torrio is ambitious.
17:13He rightly thinks that prohibition will be the making of any criminal enterprise during the 1920s.
17:21Torrio knows that regardless of the law, people will always want to drink.
17:28And whoever fills their glasses is gonna get rich.
17:31There's a growing sense that something has to be done.
17:37On May the 11th, 1920, Colosimo gets out of his car and walks into his restaurant.
17:44Chicago police, acting on tips, theorized that the person responsible was none other than Brooklyn mobster.
17:50And Al Capone's old employer at the Harvard Inn, Frankie Yale.
17:53I think there's a pretty decent chance that Capone was involved in the hit on Big Jim.
17:55He was young, he was new in town.
17:56It's the kind of thing that Johnny Torrio might have expected a new guy to do, to prove himself.
17:57I think there's a pretty decent chance that Capone was involved in the hit on Big Jim.
18:01No one is ever convicted for the crime.
18:02It's the kind of thing that Johnny Torrio might have expected a new guy to do, to prove himself.
18:04But nobody saw Capone there, so we really don't know.
18:08No one is ever convicted for the crime.
18:09No one is ever convicted for the crime.
18:10Here I think that I'm just ending up with a group release.
18:11Then myÃas were appointed by the 1950s, and he was the first of his.
18:14I think there's a pretty decent chance that Capone was involved in the hit on Big Jim.
18:19He was young, he was new in town.
18:20It's the kind of thing that Johnny Torrio might have expected a new guy to do, to prove himself.
18:26But nobody saw Capone there, so we really don't know.
18:29No-one is ever convicted for the crime, surprisingly.
18:33Now we have Johnny Torrio right at the top of the pile.
18:37And who does he take with him?
18:471920 was a big year for Al Capone,
18:50with Jim Colosimo, the head of the Chicago Outfit Dead,
18:54and the opportunities for bootlegging growing by the day.
18:59The money is starting to roll in.
19:01He's running a hundred brothels.
19:03He expands into bootlegging,
19:05but he also expands into all sorts of other businesses.
19:08They can't keep track of it all.
19:10They can't even keep track of how much money's coming in.
19:14Then on November the 14th,
19:17his father, Gabriel, dies at 55 years old,
19:21and Al becomes the new head of the family.
19:25Once Capone started making a little bit of money,
19:27he brought his whole family with him from Brooklyn.
19:30He moved his mother, his brothers, and sister
19:33into this big house on South Prairie Avenue.
19:36His older brothers, Frank and Ralph,
19:38start working with him in the business.
19:42Suddenly he's not just the family man,
19:44he's the leader of the family.
19:45In some ways he's stepping in for his dad
19:47to supply and to provide for the entire crew.
19:53Chicago is a divided city.
19:56Turf wars are raging,
19:58especially between the Northside gang and Torrio's outfit.
20:02Once Big Jim was out of the way,
20:04Chicago was wide open.
20:07Suddenly the amount of money he could make explodes infinitely.
20:11Torrio and Capone,
20:12they had the best operation in Chicago,
20:14the best and the biggest operation.
20:16They were smart enough to go to some of the breweries
20:18and say,
20:19hey, the feds have shut you down,
20:21we'll put you back in business,
20:22we'll take all the risk.
20:24We just want you to keep producing some beer for us,
20:27and we'll distribute it,
20:29we'll pay you for your time.
20:32A lot of other guys have the same idea.
20:34So rivals emerge all over town,
20:38and Capone and Torrio can't keep them all at bay.
20:42The Northside gang is run by an Irishman,
20:46Dino Banyan.
20:48Dino Banyan was a thorn in the side of the outfit.
20:51Who ran a flower shop by day
20:53and used that flower shop for cover.
20:56The interesting thing about the Northside
20:58is even though they're quite a small gang,
21:00they're very cleverly bought up almost all the breweries,
21:04so they have control of the product.
21:07And that puts them in a very strong position.
21:10These guys were in constant battle.
21:13There was sort of a code that if you took out one of my guys,
21:16I'm gonna take out one of your guys.
21:19And then once you introduce the Tommy gun
21:21and the much greater firepower,
21:23then the death count started to rise.
21:25Dino Banyan is killed in 1924.
21:36And that led to Jaime Weiss and Bugs Moran,
21:40the head of the Northside.
21:41They would have to seek revenge.
21:45Capone and his brothers move operations
21:47out of Chicago Central
21:49and into one of the suburbs called Cicero,
21:52where they have the local city manager in their pocket
21:57and manage to do pretty much what they want.
22:00There's an election out there.
22:01They want to make sure people vote right.
22:03The election is being tampered with,
22:05that voters are being intimidated.
22:07A judge hears about this
22:08and sends a bunch of police officers
22:10to turn back these gangsters from the polls
22:12to let the people vote.
22:15Shooting breaks out,
22:16and Frank Capone gets killed.
22:18On January the 10th, 1925,
22:27Capone's sedan was strafed with machine gun fire.
22:34On January the 24th,
22:36Torrio and his wife, Anne,
22:38were set upon by Moran and Weiss.
22:42Several shots hit Torrio,
22:44but when Weiss went to deliver the coup de grace,
22:47the gun jammed and the two fled.
22:53Johnny Torrio received really significant bullet wins.
22:56Everyone thinks that he can't possibly make it through this.
22:59Capone takes this shooting really to heart.
23:03He sleeps by Torrio's bed every night in a cot that he has made up,
23:07and he is the person that takes care of the day-to-day running of the business
23:12while Torrio is incapacitated.
23:16His time in hospital really is where we see this passing of the baton to Al Capone.
23:23Against all odds,
23:26Torrio would recover from his wounds.
23:29He would be taken straight from his hospital bed to prison
23:32to serve a short sentence for bootlegging.
23:34Though there are some who suggest this prison sentence
23:37came about as a result of Torrio's own negotiating.
23:41After all, where could be safer than a prison where he could buy off the guards?
23:44If you run into a situation where your life is threatened or you begin to think differently.
23:51There's something really deeply ingrained here about the legacy building of this kind of industry.
23:56It wouldn't be enough just to have it exist and for it to completely fall apart.
24:02Any good leader knows that you hand on your empire.
24:06When Capone is 26, he really faces a huge crossroads.
24:10Capone could have said, you know what, I'm good.
24:12I've made enough money. I'd like to get back to my family.
24:17I can take the money I've made and set up a legitimate business somewhere.
24:20You're getting out, I'm gonna get out too.
24:22But no, he actually embraces this new challenge.
24:26So Al Capone, at only 26,
24:31has handed the keys to the kingdom.
24:36He takes over the running of the business and no one objects to it.
24:39So it was obvious that he was actually the ordained.
24:43He was 26 years old when he took over a business which in today's terms was worth $1.5 billion.
24:52I mean, it's an extraordinary thing at 26 years old.
24:55And I think there's a part of him that really likes the attention that comes with this job.
25:06With this change in leadership comes a new way of interacting with the public and the media.
25:12Al Capone loved the limelight.
25:17His garishly colored suits, his pale gray fedora that he always wore, his overcoat that he always wore.
25:28These are symbols of Capone.
25:30The Italians have some very important codes and one of them is the code of bella figura.
25:39You gotta make yourself look better than you actually are.
25:43You never let people know exactly what's going on inside of you.
25:47Especially in front of public audiences.
25:50He wanted to dress like a banker, except even more.
25:56So he would go with bigger, wider pinstripes and brighter colors.
26:00He wanted to show a certain lifestyle and not just because he wanted to show off that he was making money.
26:05He wanted to be taken seriously.
26:07Sound and image are coming together to create newsreels.
26:11He's probably the first real media gangster that we have.
26:16And he becomes iconic.
26:19They started making movies with characters based on him.
26:23That would really kind of feed into his ego.
26:26So there's really strong elements of narcissism there.
26:30This kind of attention is validation.
26:33That, you know, how bad can I really be if all these people are paying attention to me?
26:38That's why he's given interviews to the newspapers.
26:41He's given interviews to Cosmo magazine, a women's magazine, right?
26:45He's basically saying, why don't you understand me?
26:47I'm just a good guy. I'm just an American entrepreneur.
26:50He was a businessman. He had a very successful business.
26:55He supplied the demand. You know, people wanted to be in bars.
26:59They wanted to have alcohol and he supplied the alcohol.
27:02He has an oversized personality, a nodding relationship with the truth.
27:06But he's charming, a bit like people regard Trump today.
27:15One of Capone's great strokes of genius was that he realized that you don't keep all the money.
27:22You hand it out. You make friends.
27:27When people were really struggling, he gave people jobs.
27:30He was responsible for, you know, opening a soup kitchen on the south side.
27:35The Italians weren't always allowed into the typical soup kitchens that were up.
27:41Capone was responsible for creating alternative soup kitchens, soup kitchens that, you know, that actually had good food that the Italians would eat, because Italians are very particular about their food.
27:54But he also had people come to him and complain about buying spoiled milk.
28:01I mean, I don't think he went to City Hall and did it himself, but he made sure that the expiration dates were put on milk cartons in Chicago.
28:09You can only do this when you have so much money you don't know what to do with your money, but also when you do have some compassion for the people that are your people.
28:20You see this kind of Robin Hood type character come to life, and I think that that really fed the story, the facade, the character that he wanted to portray to the outside world.
28:31Like a lot of men in his position, he was able to groom people to do the dirty work.
28:37He had a really compelling vision and could compel people and draw them into his vision.
28:42If you want to stay in business a while, you've got to have friends, so he buys off the cops, he buys off the courts, he can't get arrested if he tries.
28:52He understands that in order to protect himself, he's got to buy everyone else off.
28:57At his height, Capone probably had 60% of the Chicago Police Department in his pocket.
29:02They always say about Capone that if you met him, he was absolutely charming.
29:09He would have a glint in his eye and he would just have this great smile, but it could turn.
29:15And he would suddenly become a reptile.
29:23There's a story about how when he found out that there was an assassination attempt against him,
29:28he beat one of the victims to death with a baseball bat.
29:34It's estimated that in the period of the 1920s that we're interested in,
29:40there were 700 gangland killings in Chicago, of which 200 are associated with Capone's gang.
29:48Sometimes it felt like the Wild West in Chicago.
29:51You just have guys, you know, rolling by shooting at each other seemingly unprovoked
29:55and for grudges that you couldn't keep track of after a while.
29:59We start to get a little pushback.
30:01You start to see business leaders going to Washington, D.C. and saying,
30:05you've got to help us because our local elected officials, they're not doing anything.
30:10People are afraid to do business in Chicago.
30:11They're afraid to come here as tourists.
30:13So there's a growing sense that something has to be done.
30:16This is becoming a national problem, that lawlessness is out of control.
30:20At 10.30 in the morning, on St. Valentine's Day 1929,
30:29seven men associated with George Bugs Moran's bootlegging operation
30:34were inside a garage in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's Northside.
30:39Four men, two wearing police uniforms, pulled up in a police car and entered the garage.
30:49They drew guns and forced the men to line up against a wall shoulder to shoulder.
30:55At first, Moran's men offered no resistance until a side door opened
31:01and two other men carrying Thompson's submachine guns entered.
31:09The pictures go straight into the press, and no one holds back.
31:14Folks are drinking their coffee and eating their Wheaties,
31:18looking at the newspaper, and suddenly this gruesome, bloody scene is right in front of them.
31:24We have the impression that Capone was responsible.
31:36But it makes no sense.
31:38He already knew the feds were breathing down his neck.
31:41People thought the cops did it, because when one of the Gusenberg boys
31:44who died in the garage was still alive when police got there,
31:47he said it was the cops that did it.
31:49There's a bunch of different possible theories,
31:52but I don't think we're ever going to really know.
31:55Either way, there's a sense that this is going too far.
32:00Up until that point, crime fighting had always been considered a local issue.
32:04It was left to your police chief and your sheriff,
32:07but now the federal government is getting involved,
32:09and J. Edgar Hoover is taking over the FBI
32:12and building a national response to crime.
32:15Never before was there a greater need for unity,
32:20for a calm appraisal of the forces which work against us.
32:26Is this the beginning of the end for Capone?
32:30Seems like he's finally got a problem on his hands he can't buy his way out of.
32:36But the fortunes of the whole nation are about to change.
32:42So, things are beginning to shift now for Capone.
32:51His image is tarnished.
32:55The press have turned on him.
32:57And now the federal government have labelled him public enemy number one.
33:03The president, Herbert Hoover, no relation to J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI, starts talking to his cabinet.
33:12What are we going to do about Capone?
33:13We can't have this kind of stuff on the front page of the newspaper.
33:16We can't have these gangland killings anymore.
33:18We either have to enforce prohibition or we have to strike it from the books.
33:22But we can't just keep looking the other way.
33:24So, he decides that he's going to do something about it.
33:28This is the president deciding that he's going to get involved in an effort to take down Al Capone.
33:36The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a catastrophic collapse in the world economy,
33:43which would take a generation to recover from.
33:47We are now into this horrible depression.
33:50The economy is tanking.
33:51The stock market is nosedived.
33:53People are losing their fortunes.
33:55They're blaming President Hoover for this.
33:57And he figures that going after Al Capone will make him look good.
34:04Now, you'd think it would be pretty easy, right?
34:06Because Capone is admitting that he's a bootlegger.
34:09He's obviously making a fortune selling booze and running guns and keeping brothels, casinos.
34:16How hard could it be to take this guy out?
34:18But remember, the Chicago cops aren't going to do it.
34:21Capone was also very careful.
34:25He didn't put a lot of the business in his own name,
34:28so it wasn't clear how they were going to take him down.
34:30You've got federal prohibition agents trying to stop Capone,
34:35and they're raiding his breweries and his brothels looking for evidence of crime,
34:41but they can't pin anything on him.
34:44But there's a federal prosecutor, a U.S. attorney named George E. Q. Johnson.
34:49The Justice Department has asked him to find a way to prosecute Al Capone.
34:53And he says, what about his taxes?
34:55Has he been paying his taxes?
34:58Capone was not paying taxes.
35:00All of his income was illegal.
35:02And the federal government said to him, hey, we'd like to talk to you about your taxes.
35:05You haven't filed any returns in years.
35:07Capone actually offered to pay taxes.
35:09He said, here's how much I think I made.
35:11Tell me what I owe you.
35:13And after a while, the negotiations fell apart.
35:15So Capone had a chance to get out of this, but he didn't.
35:18He didn't pay.
35:20Capone should have realized that this was a pretty good situation for him, right?
35:24The best they can do is come after me for income tax evasion.
35:27I'm going to hire myself a really good lawyer, and I'll probably pay a settlement, and I'll be good.
35:32But when this went to trial, Capone didn't hire a good tax lawyer.
35:35He hired one of the usual lawyers who he turned to any time he got in trouble with the law.
35:41And this guy really didn't know tax law that well.
35:44The biggest mistake they make is Capone is convicted of not providing tax returns for 1925 and 1926.
35:53Well, the law didn't demand that he had to until 1927.
35:58So they could have argued that quite clearly, which would have really damaged the prosecution's case.
36:04But they don't do that. It's ridiculous. They just don't seem to know it.
36:08The judge is determined that Capone is going to go down no matter what happens.
36:13He manages to stop Capone from tampering with the jury because he changes the jury the night before the actual trial.
36:20He swaps the jury with another jury.
36:22They're all from outside Chicago, rural characters.
36:26And they're absolutely shocked by Capone's behavior because Capone arrives on the first day of the trial in a suit that is described as glaring banana yellow.
36:36So they're pretty baffled by the whole of Capone anyway.
36:39They don't have any empathy with him.
36:41They certainly wouldn't have been the jury that Capone would have chosen.
36:45Capone was convicted on five counts of income tax evasion on October the 17th, 1931.
36:53He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
37:00My grandfather got three years in the federal penitentiary for the same amount of money that he didn't declare on his income tax.
37:09Al Capone got 11 years for the same amount, the same thing.
37:15I mean, that's unheard of.
37:18If you look at what he was convicted of, today, more people are convicted of the same crime, and it's just a simple fine.
37:27I'm not saying he was a good guy, and I'm not saying he was innocent, and I'm not saying that he didn't deserve to go to jail.
37:33But he got a much stiffer sentence for income evasion than he should have gotten.
37:38Capone would serve his sentence in the infamous Alcatraz prison, a place reserved for the most dangerous criminals of the time.
37:47They built Alcatraz at a ridiculously high cost to try to deter crime, and what better way to call attention to your new tough-on-crime approach than by putting Al Capone there?
38:03And he's only a tax evasion conviction, right? Why do you got to put him in Alcatraz?
38:08But it's clear that they want to send a message, and this is really a new phase in American history, this emphasis on showing that we're tough on crime, building more prisons, something that really still runs through our society today.
38:20He started off not knowing who he was, to finding a really strong character, so strong that he wears a costume to suddenly be imprisoned, where everything that provided that sense of status and character is stripped away from him.
38:37He's just now a man, and he's a very ill man.
38:41His health began to fail.
38:43After spending years of his life on the edge, syphilis was now taking a serious toll on him.
38:51We know that Al Capone lived with inadequately treated syphilis for a very long time, which is why he entered into a tertiary stage later on in his life.
39:03It's a slow degeneration of your nervous system that comes with cognitive and motor impairment, dementia, mood swings, delusions, hallucinations, personality changes, violent outbursts.
39:20Your entire person and sense of self changes, sometimes beyond all recognition.
39:27In 1939, he was released from Alcatraz due to his failing health, and he returned to his mansion in Florida.
39:39But the once powerful gangster was a shadow of his former self.
39:45Most people think he died in prison, but he didn't. He got out and lived another ten years in Florida.
39:50The Al Capone that I knew, he was kind of like a big child.
39:59I was by his side with my father, and he would call me baby girl.
40:06He said, baby girl, I love you, and baby girl, baby girl.
40:10And my father turned to me and said, dear, dear, we've got to go back to Chicago.
40:13You've got to go back to school.
40:14So we got on the train, and we came back to Chicago.
40:20The next day, my grandfather called and said, Al just died.
40:27He died on January the 25th, 1947, at the age of 48.
40:33His body was paraded through Chicago in a hearse, and people were lining up on the streets with their hands over their hearts, their hats in their hands, their heads bowed when his casket went by.
40:58The church was filled with people.
41:04Yeah, it was quite something to see.
41:13So who was Al Capone?
41:16A hardened thug, who was also a savvy business leader, who might have been a successful CEO, or even president in another life?
41:26A brutal bully, who yet handed out food to the poor.
41:32A caring husband who rang his wife every night, but whose countless infidelities exposed her to syphilis.
41:40A loving father, who was yet responsible for countless cold-blooded murders.
41:46The truth is, he was all those things, and yet as powerful and influential as Al Capone was, like all of us, he was still subject to the whims of history.
41:59We love the idea of Capone as a morality tale.
42:05Here's the man who makes this vast fortune from illegal and violent means.
42:12We can't have him win. He's got to be brought to justice.
42:16He's not only got to be brought to justice, but he's got to be seen to suffer.
42:19This is what we don't want you to do. This is evil. If you do this, you will end up dead.
42:29People didn't understand that even the dead gangsters become heroes to somebody.
42:37People who understood why the gangster rebelled against the system began to see that as a potential model for rebelling against the system.
42:51But what blessings are there to be taken from Capone's legacy?
42:55Why are we still talking about him almost a hundred years later?
43:03His story reflects the contradictions of America.
43:07A nation built on law and order, yet rife with corruption and rebellion.
43:17We've seen lots of criminals live out loud in America, feeling like they're above the law.
43:23And that if they don't try to hide what they're doing, they might just get away with it.
43:32One thing's for certain.
43:34The legend of Al Capone will continue.
43:53You'reArGone is new to Car.
44:01Emily would interview home for Port функiley.
44:05He's a man from home, but it is the legendary friend of dropped aussie.
44:09The legend of Al Capone had been four years ago.
44:13The legend of the legacy of many humans,
44:18is the fear of the Lordhead and the dragon!
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